Hugo

tl;dr summary: jump to the solution down below for a neat trick.
the problem as i was porting one of my old pages to Hugo, i encountered and unexpected snag. the page contained an image which i wanted to appear on the page centered (< gasp > fancy that!). sounds like a 16-character problem solved straight out of muscle memory, right? not quite.
the philosophical angle the thing is, that Hugo is mainly - but not only - geared towards writing content in extended Markdown.